Greed is the root of these investors problems. They offered up anything to get a piece of each round - in this case voting power and board seats.
Uber investors are not alone - Facebook and Google investors also have little control.
Uber investors are not alone - Facebook and Google investors also have little control.
Uber has been around for 8 years now and it's asking for billions more from its investors to prop up massive operating losses while it takes longshot bets in heavily competitive spaces.
This is basically a story of investors thinking that the magic bullet for more Google/Facebook-style successes was giving founders unilateral control of the companies, and then saying, "Oh, wait."
They did $777m in sales for year six ('09), with $229m in net income.
To put that into amusing perspective, Netflix did $186m in net income for fiscal 2016 - their 18th year in business.
It's more net income (again, just in year six) than all of these following companies combined have produced in their entire histories: Uber, Didi Chuxing, Lyft, Zillow, Pinterest, Yelp, WeWork, Snapchat, Twitter, Groupon, JD.com, Zynga, Spotify, Reddit, GoDaddy, Pandora, Blue Apron, Quora, Shopify, Angie's List (could add a lot more to this list)
I'm not aware of any tech start-ups from the last ten years, that are printing income at an impressive level (something akin to the profit ramp of a Google or Facebook). Airbnb might be a candidate for a large income generator, that segment has good margins if expenses are tightly managed; it was founded in 2008, so it's about to age-off that list.
There certainly may be some young profit machines hiding in China, as a universe unto itself it can be difficult to track all the start-ups there. Jinri Toutiao for example, is at or around $2.5x billion in revenue for 2017, after just four years, a rather extraordinary growth rate for an ad business. As an aggregator, you'd think that would have tremendous margins, but they're raising tons of capital, so I'd guess they're currently spending at a very high level.
Adding it all up would be interesting. The data may even be available.
I don't understand your point about greed. Do you propose some alternative structure to corporate ownership? Seems beside the point of negotiating over voting rights.
Some people decide to buy, at say $54 in 2004. Others avoided the temptation for "greed," and decided not to buy.
Then the stock went up 18x.
Who's greedy now?
Lack of discipline is more precise. Greed parses as everything from myopia to selfishness. (Though even then, nobody on the Board is close to suffering actual losses.)